Obstinate memory: working class politics and neoliberal forgetting in the United Kingdom and Chile

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Watkins, H. ORCID: 0000-0001-7550-9838 and Urbina-Montana, M., 2022. Obstinate memory: working class politics and neoliberal forgetting in the United Kingdom and Chile. Memory Studies. ISSN 1750-6980

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980211073111

Abstract

In the forty years since Chile and the UK became the cruciblesIn the 40 years since Chile and the United Kingdom became the crucibles of neoliberalization, working-class agency has been transformed, its institutions systematically dismantled and its politics, after the continuity neoliberalism of both the UK Blair government and the Chilean Concertación, in a crisis of legitimacy. In the process, memories of struggle have been captured within narratives of ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher) – the present, past and future collapsed into Walter Benjamin’s ‘empty homogeneous time’. This article explores ways in which two traumatic moments of working-class struggle have been narrativized by the media in the service of this ‘presentism’: the 1973 coup in Chile and the 1984–1985 Miners’ Strike in the United Kingdom. We argue that the use of ‘living history’ or bottom-up approaches to memory provides an urgently needed recovery of disruptive narratives of class identity and offers a way of reclaiming alternative futures from the grip of reductive economic nationalism. of neoliberalization, working class agency has been transformed, its institutions systematically dismantled, and its politics, after the continuity neoliberalism of both the UK Blair government and the Chilean Concertaçion, in a crisis of legitimacy. In the process, memories of struggle have been captured within narratives of ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher) – the present, past and future collapsed into Walter Benjamin’s ‘empty homogenous time’.

This paper explores ways in which two traumatic moments of working-class struggle have been narrativized by the media in the service of this “presentism”: the 1973 coup in Chile, and the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike in the UK. We argue that the use of “living history” or bottom-up approaches to memory provides an urgently needed recovery of disruptive narratives of class identity, and offers a way of reclaiming alternative futures from the grip of reductive economic nationalism.

Item Type:

Journal article

Publication Title:

Memory Studies

Creators:

Watkins, H. and Urbina-Montana, M.

Publisher:

SAGE Publications

Date:

8 February 2022

ISSN:

1750-6980